@egreg Would you write double negatives in formal Italian, too? (I recently discovered that you are not meant to in Welsh. They say that nobody knows written Welsh natively, and I think they're right!)
@FaheemMitha you really just drop ne whenever you can ;) you can't drop it for instance in negative imperative: NE TOUCHEZ PAS! and not TOUCHEZ PAS! (e.g., in a museum)
@egreg we've got 14 classes altogether, with something like 5 further sub-classes, so it's around 20 altogether. But most improtantly, the verb and the adjectives have to agree with the gender of the noun
@yo' Yes, I've never understood why the plurals are treated as separate classes, but that seems to be the tradition. But I'm not a Bantuist.
@FaheemMitha Just a little.
@FaheemMitha People keep track of things quite easily. There's lots of morphology to help out, and if there's one thing that humans are good at it's categorizing.
@AlanMunn and also, the counting is weird, for instance counting toys goes as follows (from 0): žádná hračka / nula hraček, jedna hračka, dvě hračky, tři hračky, čtyři hračky, pět hraček, ...
@AlanMunn Not this human. The whole gender thing used to really upset me. When I was trying to learn languages with that "feature". And I'm not sure what you mean by morphology.
@FaheemMitha You have to distinguish second language learning from first language learning. People don't have problems learning noun classes in their first language.
@AlanMunn That's a difficult question. I only know English, really, so it would have to be that, by default. But I've been told that English cannot be the native language of an Indian. So, I guess I'm stuck.
@egreg Ah, well. Formal Welsh tends to be maximally concise. I guess double negatives are considered unnecessary. (But unlike English, in most contexts, double negatives are fine and correct.) Only 2 genders. But 3 kinds of mutation!
I guess if you live outside India long enough you can forget your native language. I imagine that happens. Though, as I say, in my case, I never spoke it in the first place.
As a child I was very Anglophile. I guess we are all young and foolish once. And vigorously resisted attempts to teach me Hindi / Indian languages in general.
@cfr Just my personal feeling/preference. It is rather harsh/guttural sounding. Kind of like how German is billed in Hollywood Nazi films.
@cfr I think German is a beautiful-sounding language. Though the written form is weird. All that running syllables together. Then again, as an adult, I'm a bit of a German-phile. :-)
@FaheemMitha I think that is why English speakers tend not to like it. French is more 'romantic' sounding. [French and German are the most commonly taught foreign languages in schools here.]
@cfr In general, yes. The Celtic ones are famous I guess, but these kinds of phenomena are relatively common. For example, French has liaison phenomena. Mandarin has various tone changes that are syntactically dependent, etc.
@FaheemMitha I don't think it is ugly. I chose to study it in school rather than French. (I don't think French is ugly either. I just found it boring.)
@FaheemMitha Nobody claims Welsh isn't a living language. The issue is rather how much longer it will be living for. But there is no doubt that it is living at the moment.
@FaheemMitha It depends how you count ;). Numbers declined badly because England tried to eradicate the language. But numbers have risen again. However, there is controversy over how you count them. (E.g. the Welsh government tends to count all school children, which is hardly fair, whereas opponents tend to not count any learners, which is also hardly fair. So it is hard to say how many speak it!)
@FaheemMitha Would-be. Sort of. Not a linguist though. Ethicist.
@cfr Quite possibly something in this, given the fact that both spelling and letter coverage in English was affected by the move from hand-writing to printing
@cfr English lacks eth and thorn even though they are present in older hand-written texts, and one explanation I've seen for that is that type was imported from mainland Europe (close by) so lacked the letters. Contrast Iceland: remote so had to make their own lead type and thus retained eth and thorn.
An area of rain, sleet and snow is expected to spread eastwards across the area during Boxing Day before clearing during the evening and overnight. Some uncertainty surrounds how much snow will occur, but several centimetres of snow is likely even at low levels, especially in a swathe through Wales and the Midlands, where there is the potential for an amber warning. As precipitation clears, roads could turn very icy.
The public should be aware of the potential for disruption from snow. Please watch for updates to this warning, especially if travelling.
@PauloCereda You are very fickle though, I have definitely seen you want to be German, and you're already Italian and Brazilian. One suspects your devotion to Queen and country may not be absolute,
@Johannes_B ok that was a stupid mistake: because of nested files, and dedicated files for packages loading and user-defined macros, I was loading my macros after loading the glossary entries with \loadglsentries{glfile}. Sorry! –
@PauloCereda There is a question on TeXwelt concerning the templates of our university (texwelt.de/wissen/fragen/10697/…). Even ven during the christmas break am i reminded of that place.
Do you know who wrote these articles? *The Remaining Troublespots in ALGOL 60* *ALGOL 60 confidential*
@PauloCereda In the former article, he closes it with this; "[...],and he hopes that nobody will ever scrutinize any of his writings as meticulosly as he and others have examined the ALGOL report".
I find it very classy way of taking any possible offense back.
Just over two months after hitting two million searches/day, we doubled our traffic again. People start to realize we’re not a Chinese restaurant.
August 19, 2013
Psmith, the TeX bot, in fixed font mode: Here's the output from texdef:
\bye:
Compile error: Forbidden control sequence found while scanning text of \write.
@1010011010 the question asked for a plain tex answer, so why do you say it's contradictory to give a plain tex answer? :-) (would you have expected a latex one?)
@DavidCarlisle That's not what I said. It's contradictory to try your best to give a TeX answer, then finish with a plain TeX command. I'm talking specifically about this line: \raise1pt\hbox to 0pt{\hss#2\hss}% which is then eventually followed by \bye.
@1010011010 that's just plain tex, the box commands happen to be primitives but there are no alternatives in plain, it's not like latex where there are "wrappers" for most primitives.
@DavidCarlisle Assume by contradiction that I'm not free of contradictions. Then you immediately get a contradiction, which of course is a contradiction. So I'm free of contradictions.
@AlanMunn It just depends on how you weigh the results. I find this passage insulting: “ First, we think that the appearance of the text is secondary to the scientific merit of an article and its impact to the field. And, second, preventing researchers from producing documents in LaTeX would save time and money to maximize the benefit of research and development for both the research team and the public.” Why not mentioning the amount of taxpayer money saved by not buying expensive software?
What are “formatting mistakes” in the opinion of the authors?
@AlanMunn Not to open a can of worms but if you read the abstract carefully it can be true. Since everybody switches to tweak mode after 5 mins. And if they consider that to be unproductive it is almost expected to come out like that.
I would say probably they have given the subjects tasks that don't have typesetting aesthetics or proper end product requirements.
OTherwise there is no @#$%%$#^ way that you can find your way around that ribbon.
Sorry, but I think that explanaition around Fig 6 shows some flaws: "However, LaTeX users made significantly more orthographic and grammatical errors than Word users"
@AlanMunn well, it depends on (1) what is important to you, (2) what amount of which is included in the text. Without mentioning what they consider and providing research on how typical articles in various fields look like, the statement is blatantly put up.
@AlanMunn I think the article is a tautology :) I wouldn't take it serious because clearly they don't know why LaTeX is used. The table shows it clearly. I guess we can summarize the article as "Quick and dirty tasks, Word is better" which I would agree.
@percusse Also, I find the table task enlightening...It's not like we don't all agree that editing tables in LaTeX can be painful. In fact for larger tables I usually make the cells in Excel and then paste them in as LaTeX code with a script.
In the introduction of the paper, we state that LaTeX embodies the principle of “What you get is what
you mean” (WYGIWYM), which implies that the document is not directly displayed on the screen and
changes, such as format settings, are not immediately visible. Although this is true, LateX users often
use synchronous-formatting interfaces that display the printed page in standard PDF which, in
principle, is more WYSIWYG than Word.
The study was conducted when most of the participants in the Word groups used Word Version 12.
@percusse Apart from the size of the texts, the task is biased towards the Word users, since the task is to reproduce the formatting of the text. Setting up an arbitrary format in LaTeX does take more time, which plausibly account for the fact that the Word users produced more text overall. But reproducing a particular format is usually done at the class level in LaTeX, and so the comparison isn't very fair.
@AlanMunn Inputting numeric data in a big numeric table should be done with dedicated external tools. Once the data is laid out, adjusting the table's appearance is easy.
@AlanMunn I think the comparison is fair in the sense that Here is some text, duplicate as good as possible.. Not only Word but any WYSIWYG would beat LaTeX users. But this article is about productivity and they should know better than anyone (as academics) that these are for serious documents presenting serious results and significant care should go in.
Take for example the caption boldness. A TeX user would go about setting up the settings of the caption package. A word user probably won't even use a caption
@percusse Consider the goal of scientific papers: transferring information. I think the issue of the outside world is that one is used to poorly typeset text. Once this numbs a little, MS Word is simply the better medium because the goal is more easily reached.
As much as I love the art of producing better print, it's an expectation that I can't justify compelling others to comply to.
On an unrelated note, does an infinitely shrinkable glue command exist in tex?
@1010011010 Deciphering your text is not the readers' responsibility. It has to be readable as much as possible. Because as you say the author is responsible for transmitting information. Leaving obscure and weird formulations to readers as exercise is loathable
if that's a word.
So you can't just type it in and submit. Typesetting research is a serious phase and the researchers are paid mostly for that much more than the content that they provide.
Current practice is stupid because everybody is in survival mode and publish or perish dominates. Using TeX at least makes it bearable.
But on a slightly more serious note, how would you (all) go about designing a better experiment? I might be willing to carry it out if people were interested.
@percusse Yes I agree that's a big issue for sure.
@percusse Overcoming the issue of long documents is tricky in an experimental setting. It might be interesting to randomly survey students submitting their theses at my university (which has an arbitrarily imposed standard) to see (i) how long they spend on final formatting (ii) how many rejections by the thesis office they get.
@percusse That is entirely correct. The only thing I'm advocating here is that when starting with the assumption that typography isn't necessarily an issue, there's limited argument to use LaTeX over Word. Since most people don't pay attention to typographic details, LaTeX is at advantage rather than Word at disadvantage. In most cases the assumption true (unfortunately) and in the process I have to read through countless document tiresome to the eyes.
@egreg There's no conditional like \ifpar right? :-)
@1010011010 It can't be used in unrestricted horizontal mode (unless another glue eventually kills the infinite shrinkability): where \ifhmode is true and \ifinner is false.
@1010011010 Right, I agree. But that limited argument is the one that makes scientific publishing worth reading/saving etc. So I don't think anyone would argue that all secreteriat suddenly should switch to LaTeX. That would be insane.
However, a researcher has to spend more time on making it readable than making it complete. Conference proceedings are compact articles and they are impossible to read. Why would you even care to publish?
So, there is a pressure from other sources that are not necessarily typography related. But at least, TeX offers ways to make it way more readable in those cramped situations.
That is a prime example of spending a lot of time to make things fit right in a two column 6-page document in order to make things readable. IF you try to tweak anything in Word, you'll have a lot of gray hair, especially if it doesn't agree with you about hypenation of a certain word.
@1010011010 @AlanMunn On another subject this came out recently on Huff 'n Puff
In Automatically creating a table from datatool using references in the text I asked a question about datatool automatically generating a table based on references to the text.
David Carlisle answered it, but I've had difficulty adapting the answer to the format of the question; namely a loop ov...
This year Dutch governmental body was almost cancelling the Elsevier publications from universities. Elsevier agreed to keep the last years price. Next year will be a little more heated.
